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Tagged: open source

Although it’s not a new concept, you can’t deny that it is awesome. The Keerbot is a wall drawing robot. By hanging on 2 known-length strings, the Keerbot uses stepper motors to shift from left and right, and move up and down by contracting and letting out string on either side. While moving a pen/marker/drawing aid makes lines of art.

In some of the demos I see the guys working on getting a spray paint fixture to work. That could be more interesting than just dragging a marker. Currently the guys are using vector art, and known CNC utils to generate g-code. Very similar to how one would do laser cutting/CNC/and 3D printing.

Check out a few more pics and video after the break. Also make sure to check out the full lineup of videos and details on keerbot.com.

When you hear the term Tricorder, you might think of Star Trek but I assure you, this is no toy prop. Keeping with the same concept of the Tricorder used on the TV show the Tricorder is about reading data, _lots_ of data. And that is what the Tricorder project aims to do, develop handheld devices that are fitted with lots of diverse sensors in order to observe them.

So far the project has produced a few different versions. The Mark 1, the Mark 2, etc. They are currently working on the Mark 5. Each version is pretty different from the other, and they all contain a wide variety of sensors such as atmospheric temperature, humidity, pressure and electromagnetic field, color, infra-red. And the obvious like GPS. They’re even working on developing their own sensors like this 3d printable mini spectrometer.

Mico is an Arduino shield that talks to your cell phone. Literally. It connects via the audio jack on your cell phone, and has the ability to read DTMF tones for control. It also can answer the phone by using the same technique your old wired headset does.

Some of the applications the mico guys have put together are it answering the phone and reading out sensor data. It has a audio playback library so with some crafty recordings you can do cool things. They even have a demo application of the shield talking to Siri on IOS in order to do more functions like send text messages.

Interesting concept, I think it’s still missing something like a little more control but I give them props for being different.

The project currently has a kickstarter going to launch a large production run, there’s also source over at github.

Andy had a problem that a lot of us have, we’re ready to move into the future and stream all of our movies (that we legally own of course) to our XBMC media center (or equivalent). But who wants to take the time to rip your entire collection? Not me. So Andy started to rip his and came to the same conclusion.

So he built a robot to automate the boring process of taking a disc from the stack, putting in the drive, taking the disc out of the drive, put it in the finished stack, and repeat. The build uses mostly 3D printed parts and servos. The process is controlled by a Raspberry Pi and a laptop.

While the original source function for this is for ripping DVDs, I don’t see why this couldn’t be adapted to ripping audio CDs, or automated cd burning by inserting cd blanks, or direct-to-cd printers, you know to get that freestyle demo of yours out!

The project it currently in its early stage, but fully functional and could be used to play multiplayer games over the Internet.

The sheer fact that people seem to spend a great deal of time modernizing vintage consoles tells you one thing, that retro gaming is awesome. The SNESoIP project is not a full solution for playing SNES games (on a real console I might add, not an emulator) over the internet, but it is a start.

The concept here is to basically move the controllers to a packet format that can be manipulated over networking. On the hardware side, it’s basically a box with an ethernet cable and a SNES controller jack. It looks like the processor is an ATmega8 with an enc28j60 for ethernet (which was mentioned earlier as a cheap Arduino solution).

The project is open source, has source code, schematic, and pcb files here on github.

[su_quote]… it runs over AVRs microcontrollers and include all the libraries and drivers required for a complete a distributed intelligent network, it also includes an Android user interface.[/su_quote]Ever wanted to make your home smarter ? Or just remotely control basically everything in your home ? Souliss is here to help. It’s a framework for DIY home automation.

What I like about Souliss versus having used traditional home automation hardware (like Z-Wave) is you aren’t restricted to what modules are available. You can craft your own using a lot of familiar hardware like Arduino’s (and I’m sure Raspberry Pi’s in the future). It’s not restricted to specific methods of communication either, you can do wired or wireless or wi-fi or serial or whatever you can use to get your devices to communicate. Great project!